farmer obama vs. the cowboys

OpEdNews | Obama, like President John F. Kennedy, has had his first encounters with the permanent warfare establishment, and so far, has been persuaded by their arguments. This book could open his eyes – and ours – to the possibility of another path.

In this eloquent, remarkable book, longtime peace activist and theologian Jim Douglass uses Thomas Merton, a prominent Catholic monk, to elevate the study of Kennedy’s presidency to a spiritual as well as physical battle with the warmongers of his time.

In 1962, as Douglass records in his preface, Merton wrote a friend the following eerily prescient analysis:

“I have little confidence in Kennedy. I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much the Time and Life mentality ….

“What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

Merton coined the term “the Unspeakable” to describe the forces of evil that seemed to defy description, that took from the planet first Kennedy, then Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, and which tragically escalated the war in Vietnam.

Merton warned that “Those who are at present too eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see.”

The Unspeakable represents not only willful evil but the void of an agenda for good, an amorality that, like a black hole, destroys all that would escape from it.

Douglass defines the Cold War version of the Unspeakable as “the void in our government’s covert-action doctrine of ‘plausible deniability,’” that sanctioned assassinations and coups to protect American business interests in the name of defeating communism.

Douglass traces Kennedy’s confrontation with the Unspeakable and his efforts to escape that trajectory. Kennedy came to understand that peace through war would never bring us true peace, but only a “Pax Americana,” which would foster resentment among the conquered, sowing the seeds of future conflicts, a fear that has proven true over and over in the years following his death.